IBM Code Patterns includes curated packages of reusable code, GitHub repos, documentation, and resources that provide a view of underlying code, including architecture diagrams and process flows, so developers don’t have to weed through thousands of code bases and documentation to get work done.

Glimmer, a library for building mobile applications that arose out of the Ember.js front-end JavaScript stack, will use custom bytecode to improve web application loading on mobile devices.

The Glimmer UI component library features a virtual machine architecture similar to the JVM in Java and Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime. This virtual machine is built to run inside the browser for use in web UIs. Glimmer and Ember also feature the Handlebars open source library for templating. Because Glimmer is the rendering engine for Ember, improvements in Glimmer help Ember as well.

The venerable, close-to-the-metal C language has enjoyed a reversal of fortune in the Tiobe language popularity index, emerging as a candidate for the index’s top gainer this year after sustaining its record low just four months ago.

Although still in second place in this month’s index behind Java, C—with its 10.158 percent rating—has jumped nearly four percentage points since August, when it sustained an all-time low of 6.477 percent. (Java also had an all-time low that month of 12.961 percent.) C’s rating also has increased 1.43 points compared to December 2016. Tiobe, which offers software quality services, attributes C’s rise this year to its usefulness in programming of small software devices and the increase of low-level software in the automotive industry, where C also has a stronghold.

Unikernels promise fast boots, tiny memory footprints, and high performance, but they must be developed from scratch for each application. NEC is working to remove this barrier to unikernel adoption with a configurable unikernel code base called Unikraft.

Developed under the auspices of the Linux Foundation’s Xen Project, Unikraft will address unikernel development issues by providing libraries of operating system components that users can pick and choose from, using a menu to build a working image. Among the goals is to support multiple target platforms including Xen, KVM, and bare metal without having to do additional work to accommodate them.

Serverless computing is coming to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry cloud computing platform, in the form of Pivotal Function Services. There’s no firm release date, but Pivotal says it’s aiming for early 2018.

Groovy, the veteran language for the Java Virtual Machine, has several enhancements on its roadmap, such as to support Java 9 modularity and Java 8 lambda capabilities. Although closely linked to Java, Groovy offers additional capabilities such as the ability to write compile-time transformations and macros.

PHP 7.2, the latest version of the popular server-side web development language, has numerous features and fixes.

The November 30, 2017, release is the second feature update to the PHP 7 series. PHP 7.0 debuted in December 2015 to much fanfare, with the upgrade offering double the performance of previous PHP iterations.

Rust, the Mozilla-sponsored programming language geared to developing fast system-level software, can now compile to the WebAssembly portable code format without the need for additional tools.

Although still not officially supported, this feature was added via a pull request to enable WebAssembly as a back end by default. Through a nightly build this week, the wasm32-unknown-unknown target became natively available in Rust. (Nightly builds are unsupported test offshoots of the formal Rust language code, but their capabilities often get merged into the official build later.)

The Eclipse Foundation, the new keeper of enterprise Java, has moved forward with nine project proposals for Eclipse Enterprise for Java (EE4J), which the organization describes as the first step toward the migration of Java EE (Enterprise Edition) to the open source tools organization.

The Eclipse Foundation, the new keeper of enterprise Java, has moved forward with nine project proposals for Eclipse Enterprise for Java (EE4J), which the organization describes as the first step toward the migration of Java EE (Enterprise Edition) to the open source tools organization.

The templates are part of NativeScript Sidekick, a GUI client companion to the NativeScript command-line interface. Sidekick was introduced on Tuesday. Along with the templates, Sidekick contains plugins, cloud builds, and debugging support. Progress Software, the developer of NativeScript, offers Sidekick as a free download.

The templates are part of NativeScript Sidekick, a GUI client companion to the NativeScript command-line interface. Sidekick was introduced on Tuesday. Along with the templates, Sidekick contains plugins, cloud builds, and debugging support. Progress Software, the developer of NativeScript, offers Sidekick as a free download.

Microsoft is looking to help developers move code from the Windows-oriented .Net Framework to cross-platform .Net Core via extended API access. But whether developers should actually make the move depends on their affinity for Windows.Microsoft has …

Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime, the virtual machine that anchors the .Net Framework, is due for a makeover, with the company announcing plans to make the CLR more efficient and scalable.

Key to this modernization will be improvements to the intermediate language underlying the CLR, called IL, which has not been upgraded in 10 years, said Mads Torgersen, lead designer for C# at Microsoft. The company wants to improve the IL and make the CLR a richer target for programming languages.

The goal of the CLR is to run .Net programs efficiently. Currently the biggest problem with .Net is the inherent limits of scalability of the runtime itself, Ben Watson, Microsoft principal software engineer, said. The CLR is being pushed beyond its original intention and design. Watson explained that when multiple gigabytes of code are being loaded, algorithms built into the CLR start breaking down.

What mixed-mode exdcution will bring to Mono

When mixed-mode execution becomes available, developers will benefit from having core libraries optimized with the LLVM compiler platform but still have flexibility of running some dynamic code, said Miguel de Icaza, a longtime leader of the Mono project.

Prominent scripting languages, once viewed as the future of programming by offering ease of use, have slipped in the monthly Tiobe index of language popularity. Only Python and JavaScript still have some momentum.

Languages that have seen their fortunes decline include Perl, PHP, and Ruby. Software quality services company Tiobe’s suspected cause is a desire among developers for higher quality than is afforded in scripting languages: “Because quality demands are getting higher and higher, hardly anybody dares to write a critical and large software system in a scripting language nowadays.”

With scripting languages, most errors show up in runtime. And this is a problem, Tiobe says. Developers can write unit tests to compensate for this but it still is “quite dangerous” because these errors can happen while the application is in production. Statically typed languages, meanwhile, have responded to the threat of scripting languages by reducing type verbosity.

Microsoft’s open source development tool is an important piece of the developer’s toolkit. Built using GitHub’s cross-platform Electron framework, Visual Studio Code is a full-featured development editor that supports a wide selection of languages and platforms, from the familiar C and C# to modern environments and languages like Go and Node.js, with parity between Windows, MacOS, and Linux releases.

Microsoft regularly updates Visual Studio Code. Keep track of the updates’ key features in this changelog.

JetBrains has made available the Kotlin/Native technology, which creates native binaries for Kotlin code so they can run without a Java virtual machine. A beta version of the CLion IDE allows Kotlin programs to be compiled directly to an executable machine-code format.

Kotlin is a statically typed JavaScript language alternative that began on the JVM. But many platforms can’t run JVMs, restricting the use of Kotlin to JVM-friendly platforms like Android. The Kotlin/Native preview’s supported target platforms include MacOS, iOS, Ubuntu Linux, and Raspberry Pi.

Microsoft’s 2018 roadmap for its open source Visual Studio Code code editor includes better performance, reduced memory consumption, and more support for JavaScript and TypeScript.

The multilanguage Visual Studio Code, which Microsoft has been updating monthly, is designed as a streamlined editor for debugging, running tasks, and version control. More complex workflows require the use of full-featured IDEs. Visual Studio Code 1.0 debuted in April 2016 and supports Node.js, JavaScript, and TypeScript.

Microsoft’s 2018 roadmap for its open source Visual Studio Code code editor includes better performance, reduced memory consumption, and more support for JavaScript and TypeScript.

The multilanguage Visual Studio Code, which Microsoft has been updating monthly, is designed as a streamlined editor for debugging, running tasks, and version control. More complex workflows require the use of full-featured IDEs. Visual Studio Code 1.0 debuted in April 2016 and supports Node.js, JavaScript, and TypeScript.

Version 1.2 of the statically typed Kotlin language, a version of Java endorsed by Google for Android app development, offers an experimental feature enabling reuse of code across platforms, as well as compatibility with the Java 9 module system.

Where to get Kotlin 1.2

Kotlin 1.2 is bundled with JetBrains’ IntelliJ Idea 2017.3 IDE, which will be released by December 1. Users of the Android Studio IDE or an older version of IntelliJ can update to the new version via Tools > Kotlin > Configure Kotlin Plugin Updates.

The new features in Kotlin 1.2

Kotlin’s experimental multiplatform projects capability lets developers reuse code between supported target platforms: JVM and JavaScript initially, and later native. Code to be shared between platforms is placed in a common module; platform-dependent parts are put in platform-specific modules. During compilation, code is produced for both the common and platform-specific parts.

When it comes to which languages developers like and dislike, Stack Overflow has some insight. Based on the languages developers tagged as those they would not like to work with in their Stack Overflow Jobs profiles, the company has found that Perl,…

Node.js 8 is graduating to Long Term Support (LTS) release status, which is intended to signify a level of stability for use in enterprise deployments. Accompanying this new designation for Node.js 8 is the debut of Node.js 9, with asynchronous resource tracking, as the “current” release line.

An Oracle-developed, low-latency Java garbage collector geared to large heaps could move to the open source community, if a proposal to do so gets community approval. Votes are due by November 8.

Called the Z Garbage Collector (ZGC), the project is designed to support multiterabyte heaps, have pause times not exceeding 10 milliseconds, and offer no more than a 15 percent application reduction throughput compared to the G1 garbage collector.

But ZGC’s developers don’t see these goals as “hard requirements” for every workload, according to a proposal floated on an OpenJDK mailing list by Per Liden, a member of the HotSpot virtual machine team at Oracle. Liden’s proposal calls for creation of a ZGC project that he would lead, with the HotSpot group as sponsor.